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Amy Adams is producing and starring in Marielle Heller’s next film, Nightbitch, about a suburban mom who thinks she’s turning into a dog. And they say there are no new ideas!

Amy Adams and Marielle Heller is one of those combinations that feels so obvious once it’s written like that. Count me in!

domino harvey wrote: Tue Jun 28, 2022 2:26 am Amy Adams is producing and starring in Marielle Heller’s next film, Nightbitch, about a suburban mom who thinks she’s turning into a dog. And they say there are no new ideas!

(Italicized by me for emphasis).
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not at the end, because as intriguing as this combination is, my first thought was "didn't Marianna Palka already make this movie?"

The first association that came to mind was "The Curse," the housewife werewolf issue from Alan Moore's "American Gothic" arc in Swamp Thing.

Spoiler

Which had its own lame double entendre. Werewolves/menstruation.

domino harvey wrote: Tue Jun 28, 2022 2:26 am Amy Adams is producing and starring in Marielle Heller’s next film, Nightbitch, about a suburban mom who thinks she’s turning into a dog. And they say there are no new ideas!

Trailer (NSFW).

Well… there goes another would-be Oscar hopeful

Maybe it’s just the way the trailer’s cut, but this feels confused about its tone. I can’t see any of the comedy (?) landing.

I think it’s a misleading trailer. I trust Marielle Heller to capably balance humor and drama, but this feels disingenuously cut to look like a relatable overwhelmed mommy comedy. It feels similar to the way Tully was positioned.

This movie contains a montage set to Weird Al’s “Dare to be Stupid,” in case anyone is entertaining that this is still an Oscar player

But the reactions are a lot better than the trailer would suggest, making it four out of four Marielle Heller movies (five out of five if you count What the Constitution Means to Me) to far exceed the promise of their logline and marketing.

According to the Joanna Newsom fan community (who I keep up with when there's a new album on the horizon, especially), the song "Divers" (which is 7+ minutes long) plays in its entirety during this film. It's the same song that was packaged with some 35mm reels back when Paul Thomas Anderson shot the video for it, the title track of her 2015 album.

There are a couple of funny moments, but this film was doomed to find a tone from its inception, and unfortunately its horribly-conceived didacticism and metaphor gratingly overshadow most elements to praise (I share the film's politics and perspective, it just makes its point every five seconds ad nauseam). I've enjoyed all of Heller's work up until now, but this quickly moves from quirkily intriguing to downright terrible and never lets up from there - a 90 minute flick that feels twice its length. Amy Adams is wasted, as her sporadically-effortful performance only gets the chance to impress you a fraction of the time - otherwise, it's impossible to rise above the rote material her character has to work with; a hackneyed product lazily posturing at originality, a brand of weird that's almost completely washed out by its affixed blandness. And there is zero reason for this movie to exist when Tully already does.